Rogers Communications and internet service startup TekSavvy have released the first-ever transparency reports from Canadian telecom companies, and what they have to say won’t lessen the concerns of privacy activists. | Bloomberg via Getty Images

Rogers Communications and internet service startup TekSavvy have released the first-ever transparency reports from Canadian telecom companies, and what they have to say won’t lessen the concerns of privacy activists.

Rogers reported that it got 174,917 government requests for information about subscribers last year, or about 480 requests per day. That’s nearly one request for subscriber data per 54 Rogers customers every year.

Some 74,000 requests came by way of court order, indicating that more than 100,000 data requests were warrantless.

Of the total, 711 had to do with “child sexual exploitation emergency assistance requests,” as Rogers classified it — though child pornography and exploitation are usually cited as among the top reasons for expanding government surveillance powers.

Rogers did not say how often it complied with the requests, but noted that “if we consider an order to be too broad, we push back and, if necessary, go to court to oppose the request.”

According to documents given to Privacy Commissioner Chantal Bernier, the federal government asks telecom for data on subscribers 1.2 million times a year. That’s one request for every 30 Canadians, every year. Most of those requests don’t involve a warrant, and in 2011 telecoms complied with at least 784,000 of those requests.

The federal government spent more than $50 million buying high-security communications technology from the U.S. National Security Agency, according to data unearthed by Vice magazine.
There have been at least 73 contracts for telecommunications equipment procured through the NSA over the past decade.

According to documents given to NDP MP Charmaine Borg under an access to information request, some telecoms are building databases of customer information specifically for police use. A Competition Bureau document noted the bureau had "accessed the Bell Canada Law Enforcement Database" 20 times in 2012-2013.

At least one Canadian telecom is evidently giving the government unrestricted access to communications on its network, according to documents from Canada’s privacy commissioner. The unnamed telecom says the government has the ability to copy the traffic on its communications network, then mine the copied data to determine what sort it is.

Critics say Bill C-13, the “anti-cyberbullying bill” the Harper government is promoting, is essentially a back-door for a host of measures that would allow greater government intrusion into private lives. The bill would provide legal immunity to telecoms that hand over customer data without a warrant, and would lower the standard under which police can get warrantless data.
Digital rights group OpenMedia says the bill “would let ... authorities create detailed profiles of Canadians based on who they talk to and what they say and do online.”
Pictured: Justice Minister Peter MacKay

Industry Minister James Moore's Digital Privacy Act is being billed as “protection for Canadians when they surf the web and shop online,” but critics say it amounts to a wholesale threat to the privacy rights it ostensibly aims to enshrine.
Bill S-4 would allow internet service providers to share customer data with any organization that is investigating a possible breach of contract, such as a copyright violation, or illegal activity. Thus, private corporations, and not just the government, could obtain personal information about you.
The bill would also eliminate court oversight of file-sharing lawsuits, which critics fear would lead to the sort of “copyright trolling” seen in the U.S.

An estimated 90 per cent of Canadian Internet traffic moves through the U.S., which means that Canadians are being caught up in the NSA’s surveillance dragnet, experts say.
Data passes through “filters and checkpoints” and is “shared with third parties, with law enforcement and of course intelligence agencies that operate in the shadows,” says Ronald Deibert, head of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

Documents obtained by the Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press suggest that Canada is engaged in mass warrantless surveillance. The documents show then-Defence Minister Peter MacKay signed a ministerial directive in November, 2011, authorizing the re-start of “a secret electronic eavesdropping program that scours global telephone records and Internet data trails – including those of Canadians – for patterns of suspicious activity.”

Canada’s electronic spy agency, CSEC, will see its budget skyrocket to $829 million in 2014-15, from $444 million this year.
Pictured: CSEC's new $1.2-billion headquarters in Ottawa, currently under construction.

According to journalist Glenn Greenwald’s book “No Place To Hide,” Canada took some $300,000 to $400,000 from the NSA in 2012 to develop surveillance capabilities. However, that money amounts to a drop in the bucket given CSEC’s $829 million budget for electronic surveillance.
Pictured: Glenn Greenwald

The CSEC was in charge of developing an international standard for encryption keys to transmit data securely. But according to documents obtained by the New York Times, CSEC handed over control of the standard to the NSA, allowing the U.S. surveillance agency to build back-doors that allowed it to crack the encryptions. As a result, the NSA was able to crack data transmissions that internet users thought were secure.

The Harper government allowed the U.S. to carry out widespread surveillance in Canada during the G20 meeting in Toronto in 2010, according to documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Few details of the espionage were released, but it appears this is a sort of rotating circle of spying: Canada helped the U.S. and U.K. spy on the 2009 G20 conference in London.

Rogers’ report came out shortly after Ontario internet service provider TekSavvy became the first ISP ever in Canada to release a transparency report.

TekSavvy did break down how often they reject government info requests, and it’s high: The ISP rejected two-thirds — or 35 — of the 52 requests for data it received in 2012 and 2013.

Of those requests, TekSavvy said only one had a court order. All the requests were to link a particular IP address on the internet with a subscriber name and address. The company didn’t say why it rejected certain requests, but noted they would reject a request if it was for too much information, or didn’t involve a criminal investigation, or weren’t made by a “lawful authority.”

The TekSavvy report was in response to a letter sent to all Canadian ISPs in January, signed by numerous privacy and civil rights activists, asking the telecoms to detail how and how often they hand over Canadians’ personal information to the government.